Frustrated while looking for the saturated absorption signal in the cell. Despite differing levels of absorption and laser intensity we could not find a lamb dip with the probe laser. We did however work out that to get the right laser frequency, whether we shift the probe or the pump, the aom needs to be upshifting the frequency either way.
On top of that the etalon from the cell is horrible. Blah. The etaloning was getting worse throughout the time we were working with the cell. When we looked at transmittance through the cell we were getting 50%. We left the windows baking overnight with the rest of the cell cold and transmittance was slightly worse than 50% in the morning. After cooling down the cell, we unwrapped a window and could visibly notice some darkening of the windows and also that the copper had been affected by the strontium.
We ordered sapphire windows and silver coated gaskets to refurbish the cell with after the conference. I also ordered some lead foil so that we don’t have to pound out our own. The sapphire should be fine as long as Sr doesn’t condense on it when it is above 600 C. Otherwise Sr that does find it we can blow off with temperature. I left the cell for the week with the valve at 400 C to blow Sr off of it before we vent and put on new windows. Unfortunately, the sapphire has a lower transmittance than glass (~80% at our wavelength).
There is also the idea that we could lock using vapor in the MOT. But since we don’t know that anybody does that we wonder what problems lie therein.
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